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Anecdotally, when I chat with Anthropic employees, they seem more genuinely concerned with safety than OpenAI employees, for better or for worse. OpenAI folks seem more or less lip service from top to bottom, while an Anthropic person has told me they struggle to sleep and have nightmares many nights about paperclipping (though that is an outlier). Hopefully the piles of money will help pay for a comfier mattress and therapy.
Obviously that's a pretension among actual decision makers. I wonder how long until we get a third AI company who positions itself as the one that truly, super duper deeply cares about safety and starts poaching employees to get started and raise VC money.
More sympathetically to the idea of working for an AI capabilities company despite being genuinely concerned about safety, suppose you think there's a 10% or even 50% chance of doom. It's very clear at this point that the genie is out of the bottle, and it's unlikely anything you're going to do is going to cause or meaningfully accelerate doom. Might as well make lots of money in the meantime and have a chance at godly amounts of money if doom doesn't happen.
I remain skeptical simply because these are, for better or worse, privately held companies and thus are really only concerned with profitability. And the problem is that safety is rarely profitable. This has happened thousands of times with thousands of products. Flaws, even potentially fatal flaws are not reasons that a product isn’t shipped absent a strong fear of lawsuits or strong regulation. And I’m not sure how hard it would to sue a company for making a dangerous AI, especially if the flaw wasn’t perfectly obvious before release.
One plausible argument for corporate safetyists (which we'll undoubtedly be seeing more of) is that we need strong regulation so that the only AIs created will be the hellful, harmless ones created by big, responsible corporations. The cat may be out of the bag, but perhaps it can be contained in a small room.
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